In 1927 the Tour de France founder, Henri Desgrange, decided that almost all the stages of the race would henceforth be team time trials. The idea was that this would make the race more exciting. As a fortuitous side effect, at least from Desgrange’s point of view, it made the riders very unhappy, since there would now be no opportunity at all for slacking off and sitting in the wheels for a bit.
Multiple national champion on the bike and award-winning author Michael Hutchinson writes for CW every week.
It was not interesting. In fact, it was immediately obvious that it was very dull indeed. It speaks much to Desgrange’s commitment to misery that he still persevered with the disastrous format until 1929.
Cycling has never really worked out what to do with the team time trial. While it was an unvarying inclusion in the Tour de France for years, the problem was that while it offered great photos of teams echeloned across the road, it also produced results that regularly dumped a cute French favourite out the back of the general classification, never to be seen again. So it got endlessly tinkered with, then sidelined.
There was a team race at the Worlds and Olympics for decades too. For men only, it was a four-rider, 100km excursion up and down the flattest, straightest road the organisers could find. As a spectacle it knitted rider misery into spectator boredom. The best that could be said for it was that it wasn’t televised until its later years, so the number of lives it blighted was limited. It was abandoned, unmourned, in 1994.
An attempted revival was the trade-team race, running from 2012 till 2018. It was less dull because it didn’t last as long, and they let women do it. But riders hated it because you didn’t even get a jersey, and the teams hated it because they had to cart a pile of bikes and staff halfway around the world every year to get thrashed by Quick Step.
Which brings us to the current version, the mixed team relay, a race we enjoyed at the UCI Road World Championships last month. It was designed as a potential Olympic event, because the IOC is very keen on mixed races. But of course, it never made it to the Games schedule. So it’s been left marooned as an event that exists so that riders who didn’t get picked for the individual time trial and those who get bored waiting for the road race (Michael Matthews, for example) have something to do on the Wednesday of Worlds week.
But I’ve come to really like it. Finally, they’ve started running it on harder courses. There’s a technical challenge to keeping a team together now. As a spectator, there’s every chance you’ll get to see at least one group of professional riders have a total meltdown. Over just an hour you can see non-stop panic, poor decision making, and the repeated inability of riders to work out that if the time is taken on the second rider, and they can’t see anyone wearing the same jersey as them on their wheel, perhaps they should slow down.
The main flaw of most time trials is that a rider or team with a healthy lead at halfway almost always goes on to win. But when halfway coincides with totally different riders taking over, that sort of predictability goes out of the window. I like to imagine the dinner table at the team hotel after one gender has won ‘their’ stage by a minute in an exhibition of smooth teamwork and been very visibly let down by the other three reenacting the Battle of Waterloo.
And yet I’m still in a minority. The relay hasn’t really caught the fans’ imagination. I’m hoping that’s mainly a lack of history to the event, and that if we stick with it, it’ll become a fixture. But I’m worried the whole TTT slot in the calendar will get changed yet again, or more likely, abandoned altogether. And really, I'd miss it.
This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.
